Sunday, September 30, 2012

If the real unemployment rate is 11% because people have
dropped out of the work force, I say, “So what?” Not long ago, articles were being written
about the possibility of a very successful society with fewer people working.
What has changed?

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

I don’t know how many of you have ever had Spoon Bread, but
I had an incident.

I was, like many people during the past two weeks, sick as a
dog. Allergies, a cold? Both, really.

So, slogging forward, as was necessary, because September is
a busy month, I kept it all going by doing the Judy Garland thing: Uppers (Sudafed) to get through the day and
Downers (Night Time Sinus Drowsy Stuff) to sleep. The effect was tri-fold.

One, my head was basically clear. Two, I was artificially up
and down. And three, I hardly ate. So I
was ravenous.

Lucky for us, we have many friends who have all these
enjoyable weekend houses and we get invited and we show up with a few bags of
things and we have a good time. On our most recent trip to the beach on Fire Island with K&J and their kids, we were treated
to amazing cooking. And sandwiches. And sweets. Everything you love. And like a
truck driver who hasn’t eaten in a week, taking the long haul from Phonenix to Bangor, I piled it in ferociously.

This would have been okay (my friends are not judgmental)
except for the last night when the Spoon Bread came out. Now, I have never had
spoon bread that I can remember. But it’s basically a casserole made from flour
and such. And it’s delicious. I don’t know if it has cheese in it…but it does
have something that sticks when it’s hot.
Anyway, in my filthy attempt at feeding my starving Sudafedded self, I
went at that Spoon Bread with both spoons, both hands, and a double delight in
what looked like the fluffiest, tastiest fun floury goop and deposited it right
into the back of my maw.

That was when I burned my entire soft palate and almost lost
my uvula. It has taken days to recover.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Look, no one loves to know that there are poor people. It’s
a fearful thing to consider. Because imagining yourself rich and successful is
just as easy as imagining yourself poor and greasy.

It would be ideal if people were not poor…but what are you
going to do? Pretend these people do not exist? Let them die of tuberculosis?

Leave it all up to Catholic Charities and the like?

Look, no one enjoys seeing a strong man or woman in their twenties sitting
around waiting for their government check and their food stamps to arrive. It’s
sort of repulsive.

But just because it’s sort of repulsive doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

There is a pecking order. And the poor slobs at the bottom
are truly at the bottom. For their own reasons, societal reasons, bad luck, and
I guess, by choice at times. But letting these people fester and die is simply
a bad idea.

Can the Right Wing agree to this idea that just letting
these people die is a bad idea?

Thursday, September 13, 2012

It's so bad, stupid and poorly made, the only reason anyone would kill over this thing is because they must be complete idiots.
I mean, if it had been a mouth oriented Scheize video where Mohammed eats the shit out of Jesus' ass and then pukes it up into Buddha's mouth, maybe, just maybe, one might think one stepped over the line a tad... but even then, any intelligent Muslim, or even a foolish fundamentalist, would realize that someone was being childish, that Western Culture is not discerning when it comes to its low end entertainment.
A leaked rumor to the religionists of this world: I hear Universal Studios, sanctioned by the U.S. government, is releasing a movie in early 2013 where the Virgin Mother Mary rides Mohammed using pig blood for lubricant that she got from the drippings of his Cuban sandwich, while six self righteous West Bank Settlers are forced to wrap her thighs in bacon. Enough with your piety, oh backward fable worshippers. Your beliefs are not religion. They are just the mind set that gives you the right to enjoy the brain chemical rush of your murderous rages and domination over others.
We have had enough of you.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

People on safari want to see lions, especially the guides.
You do see them. We saw one stalk and kill a zebra, rip it open and then she
had her cubs eat it. It was exceptionally cute. She, a male relative and the
two cubs, happily played with each other right after the kill. Like house cats that just proudly killed a mouse. A lion kills her prey by clamping her mouth over the
nose and mouth of her future food until it smothers to death. The lady lion
does the hunting. The male lion protects the perimeter. So really, he’s not
doing nothing at all. Pics at link at the bottom. (Or above)

Cheetahs travel in pairs. Often two boys. They are the
fastest land animals. They have a long black tear that runs under each eye.
They are sleek, gorgeous hunters. We saw three of them. Pics below and above
link.

Elephants have terrible digestion. They only digest about
40% of what they eat. So they have to eat about 18 hours each day. One night,
we had elephants right outside our camp knocking down trees and eating their
leaves. You know when elephants are visiting. They are noisy and destructive.
And you’ll never forget it. We saw hundreds of them. Pics, yes.

There are so many kinds of antelopes. The largest is the
eland. (Almost like a yak.) The smallest that we saw was the Dik-Dik. Dik-Diks
mate for life. Very sweet creatures with a circle around each eye. The
Steenbock is a small antelope, too, larger than the Dik- Dik. The Thomson
gazelle has a black stripe along the side. The Impala, which is so lovely, has
amazing horns (the male) and vertical black stripes on their white rumps. They
are all over the place. Lovely. The Hartebeest is another great antelope, with
its horns forming a heart shape. Similar to the Topi (which has dark upper leg
splotches) and just a bit smaller than the Waterbuck, an antelope that lives,
you guessed it, always near water. There is also the smaller Reedbuck, another
hydrophilic antelope, smaller than the waterbuck. And the Klipspringer, which
is a smallish antelope that has round ears and behaves a lot like a goat,
living and jumping around rocky areas. We saw them in the morning before
breakfast at our last place.

The larger mongooses are mostly out at night. Smaller ones
are out during the day. A bunch of them can eat a python. We saw all these.

We also saw Hippos having sex. The man mounts his lady, in
water, keeping her head pushed down, occasionally letting her up for air. The
sex can go on for two days as it is hard for the male hippo to keep his
erection planted inside the female. And once in, it can easily slip out. Hippos
live in their own filth. I used to think they were amazing…now, they just seem
like enormous pigs to me. They feed all night long, because the sun during the
day would fry off their skin. They crap in their water and live in it. You can
watch the big blobs of hippos shit float up to the surface while they wallow.
When they “yawn” it is really a dominance game in order to show off the size of
their large molars.

Zebras, no matter how many you see, and you see a lot of
them in Tanzania,
are so pretty. Wildebeest, they say, are made from leftover parts of other
animals. These two travel together because the Zebras have great eyesight, just
enough memory to know where to go for grass each year and they eat quantity of
all kinds of grasses. It is not picky. And so it ends up being a big mammal,
great for a meal for a lion. The wildebeest is rather dumb, a type of cow,
really, and it needs the Zebra for memory and for its eyesight. In return, the
wildebeest has a fabulous sense of smell. Wildebeest eat low amounts of high
quality grass. These two animals are the staple of the great migration.

We saw storks, flamingos and pelicans. A funny large bird
called the Kori Bustard, (largest bird of flight). Eagles, love birds, hawks,
vultures. Birds are magic.

Warthogs, no matter how many you see, are always funny. I
love them.

Giraffes, no matter how many, are so lovely to watch. We
watched a baby giraffe run around near its mother, practicing its hoof work.
Female giraffes have much lighter spots than males. Spots on the male giraffe
are practically black. The females, more orange. I have movies which will be
posted at some point.

The African buffalo is enormous and they live in herds. They
are intimidating and ornery and the older males are kicked out of the herd to
live on their own. This makes them even more ornery.

Hyenas, after a big meal, get extremely hot from the digesting
of bones in their stomach so after a big meal they will sit in a puddle to cool
off. Female hyenas have fake penises they use to establish dominance. Not
unlike a glorious lesbian with a dildo. Though lesbians can digest bones in
their stomach without a rise in body temperature. I don’t know what I love
more, lesbians or hyenas, but does it really have to be a competition?

Baboons travel in huge packs. They mostly eat plants, but
are not above eating your face.

Black faced Vervet monkeys are super frigging cute.

Not many rhinoceros left. We saw one in the Ngorogoro
crater, where this is possible. It just lay there.

If you get a flat tire, consider yourself lucky as it is
changed and you are standing on the side of the road watching giraffes go at it
with the acacia trees.

The spring hare (no pic of that worth showing) is also
called the African Kangaroo for how it jumps along. It really does ambulate
like that marsupial. But it is a rabbit.

The crocodile and the hippo live in harmony. They don’t
bother each other too much. They are an even match.

The civet cat, which we did see one night, is almost never
spotted.

The hyrax, which looks like a ground hog, can be
domesticated.

The termite mound becomes home to all sorts of animals,
especially snakes, warthogs and mongooses. Once an animal invades, all the
termites leave.

The Maasai, who we spent a lot of quality time with at our
camps and lodges and also at one of their real bomas, are gorgeous. The men
wear bright robes. (The lions are terrified of the Maasai and stay away.) Every
fifteen years, any boy who has not been circumcised goes through a ritual
(including from weeks to months, depending on how rich their father is, of
wearing dark clothing and white face paint to scare away demons), that ends in
the circumcision ceremony. After that, he must wait to become an elder before
he can marry. He becomes an elder when the next load of boys goes through their
circumcision. So it takes some time. A man’s wealth is measured by his number
of cows and children. Since he may have many wives, from two to two-hundred, he
can easily amass a huge family. All he needs to increase his wife-load is some
cows for trading. Traditionally, a woman gets her clitoris removed before
marriage. (Though currently the government is cracking down on this practice, a
traditional marriage still requires this mutilation. But as one guide told us,
“A Maasai woman does not enjoy sex anyway.”
He meant with or without a clitoris.) A man cannot marry until after he
has been circumcised and becomes an elder. A woman can marry anytime after she
has been circumcised. This leaves many young men single for a long time. I
witnessed men holding hands. I also witnessed an incredible languid nature that
was very much connected to the earth. They are smiley and present. I have the video.
Stay tuned for an eventual movie of this. Though, overall, Tanzanians are a bit
formal and any display of any kind of sexual feelings, we did not see.

Do not try to video a lion killing a zebra. You will miss
the exact moment of “The Grab” when the lion bites that hind flank of the last
zebra up the hill, flips up on that horsey back and then swings down around to
the face to clamp and smother. Even if you see all the stalking and then all
the clamping, you will regret, for the rest of your life, that you were
fumbling with your stupid little Canon Powershot video option during the most
exciting moment of your life. You will have to rely upon your husband to tell
you again and again exactly how it happened. You will then have to watch on
YouTube lion on zebra kills, just like everyone else who has never been on
safari.

You will survive in a tent even if it has mice. If you have
power bars of any kind in your knapsack, they will chew through many layers of
anything at all to eat those bars. Then you will have to throw out the swiss
cheese looking zip lock and all the half eaten bars. When this happens to your
husband, all you can tell him is, “Make sure you throw out that mess far away
from this tent.”

It is always fun to take a private safari. Add to that a few
other people in their own private trips run by the same company who you run
into more than once here and there at camps and lodges for dinner, and you make
instant friends because the whole experience is so incredibly enlivening.

Do not drive from Ngorogoro Crater to the Serengeti. It is
punishing, bumpy, long and dusty. Take a bush plane. It is worth it.

What to do that we did, when you go:

Bring ivory soap and a portable clothesline for laundry.

Bring a head lamp.

Bring great binoculars.

Bring Purell Wipes.

Pack as lightly as possible, buying up all those super light
pants and shorts at R.E.I.

A Tilley hat, though unoriginal, is your best friend.

Make sure everything has a case.

Bring guide books.

And:

Take pictures, but don’t try to video the
lion-on-zebra-kill, as I mentioned, for you will miss “The Grab.”

We were “in the bush” for ten days. Seven days is probably
enough. Go away somewhere lush and pampering when you are finished. Safaris are
rough. Bring Pink Bismuth tablets for your stomach, Benedryl for sleeping. And
anything else you may require for your body parts that tend toward any
vulnerability.

Though the climate is much like Southern California, don’t
count on a film career in Tanzania.

You can’t save all the poor people in Tanzania, most
of who seem to spend their days in transit in search of water. A society cannot
modernize while its citizens spend most of their daylight hours fetching
water. Polygamy seems anti-productive,
too. A man would be much richer with fewer wives and fewer children and the
same number of cattle. But if you start pulling on strings of the Maasai
culture, the whole thing could unravel for good. They are holding onto their
past, firmly, with both dusty fists. I do not understand any kind of tribalism.
It puts culture ahead of the individual. Blech. Let it go, old timey types. The
Enlightenment has happened.

Ostriches are solitary birds and can easily outrun a
lion. Plus, they don’t make for a good meal.

If you look due north from Boundary Hill Lodge, our last
lovely place, you can see Kilimanjaro.

Tsetse flies can bite through a light pair of jeans and
underwear to get at your scrotum. Particularly enjoyable on the last day of
your trip. They are zig zaggy zippy things. And it seems like they bite with a
very long proboscis. I hope I do not get sleeping sickness or elephantiasis.
Wearing no shoes at night can get you stung by a bee, in your tent. Another fun
experience. But at least the bee was half killed before it stung so it was only
half a sting.

Jackals are cool.

Aardvarks, though rarely spotted, are all over Africa. We did not see one.

Leopards, of which we saw three, like to hang out in trees
and are hard to spot. They look like cheetahs, but they are larger, with bigger
heads, more defined spots and they do not have the long black tear coming down
their face.

Everyone in Africa loves
you, as long as you are tipping.

Just because it took twenty-four hours to get to Arusha,
don’t think it isn’t going to take thirty-six hours to return via Dar Es Salaam.

There is no greater delight than watching a little Maasai
girl giggling as she rubs the hair on your arm, something which is so unusual
to her. There is nothing sadder than a Maasai woman, who still has her eyesight
(unlike some of her older sister wives), yet haggard beyond her years from
living in dirt and dung, in a midnight blue wrap with almond shaped eyes, who
looks at you deeply with a desire to connect and a desire to flee. And you
can’t help her. So you just go back to your fancy lodge and cry.

No matter any inconvenience, physical pain, or cultural
freakishness, it is worth the effort to see this amazing diversity of so many
animals in such great numbers. Africa: I give
it two paws up. Roar.